Monday, 15 February 2010

"This must never happen again" - how did 1.2 million deaths a year become normal ?

"Victim blaming" started
quite early on as this article
from 1929 illustrates

According to the World Health Organisation, the coroner who looked into the world's first car crash fatality, back in 1896, said "This must never happen again".

Unfortunately, it did happen again and it's kept happening ever since. These days, there are 1.2 million people killed every year by car crashes and another 50 million injured. If road deaths continue to grow at the expected rate, it is estimated that we will have seen growth of more than 60% between 2000 and 2020, meaning that nearly 2 million people per year will lose their lives in car crashes by that time.

Who gets hurt ?
"Most of these injuries will occur in developing countries where more and more people are using motorized transport. In these countries, cyclists, motorcyclists, users of public transport, and pedestrians are especially vulnerable to road traffic injuries."

In total, motor vehicles have killed more people in the last hundred years than wars have (I mentioned this in a previous post, but it bears repeating). Yes, motor vehicles have been far more lethal than such things as nuclear weapons, machine guns and napalm. In fact, you can add up all of the damage done by those things, and all the results of all terrorism right across the world, and still come up short of the death toll due to motor vehicles.

Crashes surprise people
Why do we put up with this ? I have a theory. I've noticed that while the lethality of motor vehicles might seem obvious given the results, people are often very surprised when cars crash and the results are serious. Cars feel safe and they are marketed as being safe but the danger that they present is beyond what people realise.

An Atomic Bomb. Not nearly so
deadly as automobiles.

If we fall when walking, the magnitude of the injury is quite close to what people expect. Normally you'll do no harm at all or perhaps get a minor injury such as a sprained ankle or scraped knee. You can go faster if you run, but you get worn out quickly.

Cycling is a little more unpredictable. We've used a machine to make ourselves faster, but it still takes considerable human effort to raise our speeds much (there's a calculator here which shows how much effort for different speeds). Higher speeds are possible only after you've cycled enough to build the muscles, and experience comes at the same time. Falls hurt much more if you're going faster. If we fall while descending a hill the crash can be particularly dangerous. However, at least when you cycle you know it's going to hurt if you fall off. Personally, I like riding fast, but I'm a timid descender of hills because when going down hills some of my control is taken away.

Cars give another considerable increase in speed, and there is a further difference. You can go fast for no real effort and with no practice or skill required. What's more, cars remove the cues that normally make us realize we're travelling fast, such as wind noise, and the feeling of wind in the hair and on the face.

While even "slow" speeds by car are quite dangerous (especially for people outside the car), driving feels safe. It's so sanitised an experience that it's actually boring enough for people to fall asleep while driving at speeds which would keep you very much awake on a bicycle.

Somewhere in middle of the confusion comes the blame shifting. If you walk into someone in the street you would not blame the other person. If you cycle into someone you also probably wouldn't. However, driving somehow changes this. The victims frequently get the blame.

It's not a problem for society if those who are looking for a thrill in a car do so on closed circuits but it is if they do it on the public roads. Many people claim that they like cars and like driving but very few take up motor sport so they can truly test their skills. In reality the purported love of driving often comes down to nothing more than people driving cars to get to places because it is the least bad option open to them.

1.2 million deaths per year are tragic enough, but they're actually just the tip of the ice-berg. There are also 50 million people injured each year by cars. What's more, the deaths due to crashes are not all of the deaths. It is difficult to pin down exactly, but some estimates put deaths due to pollution from cars at ten times the figures for crashes and deaths due to effects such as obesity due to a sedentary lifestyle assisted by the car are also a major cause of death.

9 comments:

What I find most amazing is the redefinition of "responsibility". In any (US) discussion of cycling on roads, you will find people who believe that "because cycling is dangerous", cyclists must be "responsible" for their own safety -- as if it were a character defect, to not be utterly focused on one's own safety (as if that were not already the case). There's no notion of being responsible for the safety of other people (of course, this would reflect rather poorly on anyone choosing to drive a car when they could get around some other way). It is the logic of an arm's race -- if cyclists were (much) more dangerous to cars, why, wouldn't it then be the "responsibility" of drivers to avoid cyclists, for their own driving safety?

I should note, from various experiments here, that people in cars are not so happy if pedestrians do aggressively (as opposed to passively) attend to their safety. Shine a high-intensity LED flashlight into drivers' eyes at a crosswalk, they do not like that. Push a cart before you into a crosswalk (and why should the pedestrian pause? They have the right, and the car is presumed to be traveling at a safe speed that would allow a stop) is not happy-making, either. Enter a crosswalk with your keys held out in front of you, as if to scratch a non-stopping car, and suddenly the guy who pretended not to see you, can see those itty-bitty keys, and gets angry. Why? If he intended to stop, why should he care about the keys that could only scratch a car that ran the crosswalk?

The "safety" claims are a ruse; we're supposed to stay out of the way.

dr2chase wrote:"What I find most amazing is the redefinition of 'responsibility.'"

Kevin's comment:Here in Ontario, we've got the same definition of responsibility that we've always had. To quote from Section 193 of Ontario's Highway Traffic Act:

"When loss or damage is sustained by any person by reason of a motor vehicle on a highway, the onus of proof that the loss or damage did not arise through the negligence or improper conduct of the owner, driver, lessee or operator of the motor vehicle is upon the owner, driver, lessee or operator of the motor vehicle."

I note that Ontario's legislature reviewed the HTA this year and advised Her Majesty the Queen to enact some changes. By Royal Proclamation, those changes came into effect on January 1, 2010. Section 193 was NOT changed.

One thing that kind of bothers me about this sort of discussion is the human irrationality when discussing risk.

For example, swimming is more dangerous than cycling, yet swimmers do not discuss drowning as obsessively as cyclists discuss crashes.

Another example is the fact that cars kill far more people through their pollution than by hitting people. Yet what gets discussed?

In Toronto, car pollution kills 440 people each year and injures another 1,700 so seriously that they have to be hospitalized. I presume that similar numbers apply in other cities, including in The Netherlands. Why isn't that the centre of discussion?

"Anyway, somewhere in middle of this confusion comes the blame shifting. If you walk into someone in the street you would not blame the other person. If you cycle into someone you also probably wouldn't. However, driving somehow changes this. The victims frequently get the blame."

Kevin's comment:That's not Canada. All three examples were from British Columbia, which is a strange and bizarre place in so many ways. Including the fact that its #1 agricultural product is marijuana.

Rest assured that, in Ontario, there is no mandatory helmet law for adults, cyclists have the right to the entire road lane (and no obligation to ride in single file) and the police do not concern themselves with silly regulations against cyclists. Because there are none.

David, aside from laws and legislation that we can all squabble about till the cows come home, the facts and figures of your piece are harrowing indeed. But the way in which the motor car is marketed does indeed make the perception of it as being 'safe' - how do we go about conveying the core of your message (ie that road safety is a serious issue) to the wider general public?

I think that these casualties are considered to be an unwanted side effect rather than a tragedy or a crime and this attitude owes a lot to the apparent convenience of the car. It is considered “worth the risk” because the users don’t want to give it up, not unlike a heroin addict.Mark Garrett, Bristol UK

Kevin, the Dutch actually use cannabis less often than people from other countries, oh say the United States, Canada, the UK, yet it is freely available for purchase in most Dutch cities as long as you do not get 5 grams at a time. The Dutch do have strong anti driving high laws, and certainly discourage cycling and walking while under the influence if it is not already an offense. Ontario does have cyclists, mostly on the recreational trails which not surprisingly, are completely away from motor traffic. Some actually pretty good cycle infrastructure has been built recently, though not yet up to the very high standards of the Dutch. Toronto Waterfront for example has been reconstructed with a fully exclusive cycle track which has cars on a separate signal stage from cyclists and streetcars/trams. Not surprisingly, because motor vehicles do not intimidate here, you see many cyclists. Elsewhere, like on arteries like King Street or where Eglington Ave has not had cycle tracks installed yet, not surprisingly, the number of cyclists is low. Build it and they will come, though you get much more people to come the more connected to a high quality network of cycle paths, shortcuts and quiet, low speed 30 km/h residential streets. Note that intersections need to be designed safely, the Dutch use both protected intersections and simultaneous green well, both have their uses, both do make you feel very safe while riding, roundabouts, regardless of priority have lower rates of collisions than either cycle lanes on roundabouts or mixing with busy motor traffic (note busy, on quiet residential streets if a roundabout is built for some reason, maybe a miniroundabout built to avoid a 4 way stop, cyclists can mix well), and gateway treatments at minor side streets need to be built well to avoid hooking, but when you make it easy to cycle with as few stops as possible, with as little time to cycle required as possible, and making you feel safe while doing it, so safe that even a 6-8 year old child can cycle on their own and parents have no trouble with cycling with a 3-4 year old child on their own small bicycle, and the 90 year old can jog while not feeling like a car or bicycle is going to hurt him/her by making sure that cyclists are separated from pedestrians as well as cars, and that 90 year old can just as easily cycle if their body is not too frail for it, then you can have just as many cyclists as Dutch cities or more.

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